Imagination cannot be quantified, but Miranda July nonetheless boldly tries to in her new film—starting with its title, “Kajillionaire.” It’s saying too little to credit July with more imagination than most filmmakers. More important, her formidable powers are distinctively cinematic—they aren’t limited to the conceits of screenwriting but run comprehensively through her movies, inflecting image, performance, sound, dialogue, music, the conception of character, and the very vision of the world. Like July’s 2011 film, “The Future,” “Kajillionaire” (which opens in theatres on Friday) is built on a cosmic scale, with personal suffering finding correlates—even effects—in enormous geological events with a metaphysical twist. Like “The Future,” “Kajillionaire” is a simple and linear story in which complexity arises from the radical expressiveness of more or less its every moment, and in which the elements of fantasy look deeply at fundamental realities. Just as “The Future” is one of the most discerning movies about the lives and loves of young idealists, “Kajillionaire” is a ferociously sharp-minded movie about parents and children, about families and their bonds, about family unity and its place in the world.
It’s the tale of the Dyne family, a trio of desperate scammers: Theresa (Debra Winger), Robert (Richard Jenkins), and their daughter, Old Dolio (Evan Rachel Wood), who has been raised to be a scammer along with them, and whose very name—which isn’t even heard until late in the film—is the vestige of a scam. Unable to raise the rent on their strange and sordid unofficial apartment (an empty office in a rundown factory), they pursue one more scheme, and, along the way, Theresa and Robert lure an outsider—an optician’s young assistant, named Melanie (Gina Rodriguez)—to work with them and enter the family circle, sparking Old Dolio’s jealous resentment. Old Dolio has been raised with the toughest of love, with no discernible signs of affection and no childlike frippery. (She wears style-free and mismatched sweatshirts and pants; her hair hangs loosely down, untended; and her quasi-robotic voice reflects an upbringing without emotional expression or empathetic connection.) Yet the faux warmth with which Theresa and Robert welcome Melanie arouses Old Dolio’s yearning for some authentic parental warmth—and Melanie, with authentically warm feelings toward Old Dolio, engages in some manipulative behavior of her own, in the interest of her prospective friend.
The movie’s drama is built on an abstract and fantastic framework (Did Old Dolio ever go to school? Did her somewhat distinctive background arouse questions?), but a bare-bones synopsis hardly captures the florid displays and pointillistic touches with which July dramatically expands and exquisitely illuminates the action—the emotional power that arises from her large-scale inspirations along with her finely discerning, poignant sensitivity to the piercing power of offhand remarks and passing glances. It’s in these adornments, at both ends of the perceptual spectrum—the monumental and the flickering—that July turns an implausible fantasy into a work of emotional and intellectual realism.
Also like “The Future,” “Kajillionaire” is a story of the temptations of isolation and solitude in the name of independence. Yet “The Future” is built on the dramatic bedrock of simple, familiar, instantly recognizable situations and characters, a pair of thirtyish artists living on dull day jobs and pining for the time and the mental space to create in unencumbered freedom. By contrast, “Kajillionaire” is a narrative house of cards, with many tiny backstory details, dropped in along the way, that have to fit together just so in order for it to make any sense at all. The elaborate setup makes the movie very hard to describe—because nearly every detail is both a plot point that shouldn’t be spoiled and a giddy surprise that’s wondrous to experience. What’s more, it’s all too easy to dwell on July’s teeming, idiosyncratic contrivances at the expense of the strong ideas that energize them. July’s world-building, her creation of a wholly synthetic setup, is ingenious in and of itself, but its allegorical artifice is not at all divorced from the mind-bending pressures of the modern day. Rather, its surrealism is a way of facing present-day realities minus the political particulars that can hardly be addressed without screaming. “Kajillionaire” is a metaphorical vision of a world out of whack, and it sees the disturbances in a vicious cycle that links economic despair, embittered nostalgia, and wanton cruelty. July’s aesthetic imagination is inseparable from her empathetic curiosity and emotional urgency; it tempers a howl of anguish at a world of pain into a kind of cinematic music that unfolds it in nuanced detail and extends a hand of consolation, even offers a note of hope.
The Dynes’ main scheme is postal theft; Old Dolio somersaults outside the post-office door (as if avoiding detection) and, reaching deep into a post-office box that they rent, steals letters and packages from neighboring boxes. They don’t just pilfer merchandise and checks; they insinuate themselves into the lives of people whose names and addresses they harvest, and hand-deliver ostensibly “lost” merchandise in quest of rewards, or, with clever diversionary tactics, steal from them. But, at the start of the action, the family is desperate: they’re on the verge of eviction from their utterly inadequate housing, an empty office in a company called Bubbles, Inc., which actually makes bubbles. Their room leaks bubbles (they have to be there at specific times, to mop the overflow), but they pay only (!) five hundred dollars per month, which now they don’t have. They’re three months in arrears and cadge a two-week extension for their fifteen-hundred-dollar debt from the company’s owner (Mark Ivanir), whose comedically involuntary soft-heartedness is a natural fit for a suds-maker.
It’s Old Dolio who figures out the scam that will pull them through, with a payout of fifteen hundred and seventy-five dollars (a figure that turns into a sort of incantation, as does its divisibility into an even three-way split). Old Dolio, the virtually nameless child, is also something of an ageless child (though she’s revealed to be twenty-six). She is an equal of sorts to her parents but also their total dependent—even as, to a large extent, her parents depend on her (not least, for her skills as a forger). Theresa and Robert, called upon to justify their unsentimental ways, present them as egalitarian—they treated her like an adult, without the comforting illusions or delusions of childhood gaiety and frivolity. What’s more, they take for granted that their nurture follows her nature—that she utterly lacks the human feelings that others, such as Melanie, display. They’re wrong, of course; Old Dolio’s journey of self-discovery—aided by Melanie’s alert ruses—and self-differentiation from her parents is the movie’s core.
The Dynes are raw survivalists whose lives of crime keep them off the grid, where Robert wants them to be; he fears surveillance cameras, fears being traceable in any way by society at large, thinks that society at large is inherently corrupt and is run on addictions as much material as emotional. (He cites caffeine and sugar.) Father knows best: with contempt for what passes for ordinary life, he uses the very title of the film to belittle the widespread and delusional dreams of wealth which he thinks drive people to lead lives of quiet aspiration. (Spoiler alert: the real kajillions are love.)
